An abundance of information is available via the Internet. Users can direct web browser applications, such as Mozilla Firefox, to various Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in order to view content that is associated with those URLs. In order to assist users in locating certain kinds of content for which the users do not know the associated URLs, various Internet search engines have emerged. Yahoo! is the owner and operator of one of these Internet search engines.
A user can enter a set of query terms into an Internet search engine's user interface. The Internet search engine receives the query terms and searches an index for known content items that are associated with the query terms. The Internet search engine creates a list of content items that are relevant to the submitted query terms. The Internet search engine returns the list to the user.
The earliest Internet search engines returned search results from the Internet as a whole, without any regard to any specific categories into which those search results could fit. As Internet search engines evolved, certain content categories, called “verticals,” became recognized. Given the set of all content that is accessible via the Internet, a “vertical” is a subset of that content that satisfies some criteria that are associated with that vertical.
For example, one vertical recognized by the Yahoo! Internet search engine is the “images” vertical. The “images” vertical only consists of Internet-accessible images (e.g., files representing visual content in a format such as GIF, JPEG, bitmap, etc.). The “images” vertical excludes all content that is not image content. Regular Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) web pages are excluded from the “images” vertical, although images embedded within such HTML web pages may be included within the “images” vertical.
The Yahoo! Internet search engine allows a user to specify, in addition to a set of query terms, a specific vertical in which the user would like to conduct a search for content. The verticals from which a user of the Yahoo! Internet search engine may select include “web” (which includes all query-term relevant search results unfiltered by any vertical criteria), “video,” “images,” “local,” “shopping,” “answers,” “audio,” “directory,” “jobs,” and “news.” If a user conducts a search using a particular set of query terms in the “web” vertical, then the user might obtain a much larger but much less focused set of search results than if the user conducted the search using the same particular set of query terms in a more specific vertical such as “images.” If the user knows at the outset that the user is specifically interested in images that are relevant to the query terms, then the user might be better off conducting the search in the “images” vertical instead of the “web” vertical.
Unfortunately, many users are unaware of and have never searched verticals other than the very broad and inclusive “web” vertical (which is typically the default vertical searched in the absence of the user's express selection of some other vertical). Other than by using a trial-and-error approach in which the user tries submitting the same query terms in each vertical, a user might not be able to ascertain which of the several verticals is most likely to yield search results in which the user is genuinely interested. Most users are unwilling to employ such an approach. As a result, many users miss finding content in which they would be highly interested, and which they might have found had they taken the time and effort to search a specific vertical.
Different verticals may be associated with different URLs to which a user might direct his browser in order to access that vertical directly. For example, a “local” vertical might be associated with the URL “local.yahoo.com,” while a “real estate” vertical might be associated with the URL “realestate.yahoo.com,” while a “jobs” vertical might be associated with a URL “hotjobs.yahoo.com.” Some users might be aware of the URLs for specific verticals, but unaware that the other verticals even exist. Such a user might not know that if he is looking for a job, it would be better to direct his browser to “hotjobs.yahoo.com” than to “local.yahoo.com.” However, if such a user has only previously experienced and dealt with “local.yahoo.com,” then that user might not even know that “hotjobs.yahoo.com” exists. Consequently, when the user submits, into the query term field at “local.yahoo.com,” query terms that describe a job that the user is seeking, the user might not get any truly relevant results at all. Thus, even if there are abundant relevant job listings, which the user might have found had he entered the same query terms at “hotjobs.yahoo.com,” the user might not receive any relevant search results about such jobs, because few or none of those jobs might be indexed in the “local” vertical. The user may come to believe that the lack of pertinent results is the fault of the search engine, when the fault actually lies with the user's choice of vertical in which to conduct the search.
People who are selling products and services often would like to advertise those products and services on the Internet. Sometimes, these people approach search engine companies and enter into agreements to pay the search engine companies money in exchange for having the search engine companies show those peoples' advertisements in conjunction with search results that have been obtained from the web as a whole (rather than any specific vertical). Thus, when someone submits query terms for a search of the web as a whole, the search engine determines whether any advertisements are relevant to the query terms, and, if so, displays at least some (but a limited number) of the relevant advertisements, along with the search results, to the person who submitted the query terms. Unfortunately, it can be very expensive to have an advertisement displayed, even once, in conjunction with search results that are gathered from all over the web. Competition to have advertisements displayed with search results gathered from the web as a whole is quite keen, and typically only advertisements associated with a few highest bidders are ultimately presented with any set of those search results. Often, this expense is so significant that common people (in contrast to large corporations) decide that they cannot afford to have their advertisements displayed by a search engine.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.